The role of thioredoxin proteins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis probed by proteome-wide target profiling

Mycobacterium tuberculosis encounters diverse microenvironments, including oxidative assault (ROS and RNS), when it attempts to establish itself within its human host. Therefore, redox sensory and regulation processes are assumed significant importance, as these are essential processes for M. tuberculosis to survive under these hostile conditions. M. tuberculosis contains thioredoxin system to maintain redox homeostasis, which establish a balance between the thiol/dithiol couple. Still very less is known about it. In the present study, we attempted to capture the targets of all the M. tuberculosis thioredoxin proteins (viz., TrxB and TrxC) and a thioredoxin-like protein, NrdH, under aerobic and hypoxic conditions by performing thioredoxin trapping chromatography followed by mass spectrometry. We found that TrxC captured the maximum number of targets in both the physiological conditions and most of the targets of TrxB and NrdH showing overlap with targets of TrxC, indicating that TrxC acts as main thioredoxin. Further the PANTHER classification system provides involvement of targets in various metabolic processes and Gene Ontology analysis suggests that glutamine biosynthetic process and Fe–S cluster biosynthesis are the most enriched processes in the target list of TrxC and TrxB respectively. Also, we suggest that the thioredoxin system might play an important role under hypoxia by targeting those proteins which are responsible to sense and maintain hypoxic conditions. Furthermore, our studies establish a link between TrxB and iron-sulfur cluster biogenesis in M. tuberculosis. Ultimately, these findings open a new direction to target the thioredoxin system for screening new anti-mycobacterial drug targets.